"Who wants to kiss our beer bellies?" the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten asked the audience Thursday night at the Universal Amphitheatre, lifting his XL black shirt to reveal a mound of pasty flesh. The move led to wild cheering and waves of affectionate laughter. As in the opening tour stop last month in Denver, Thursday's audience didn't come to joust with the Pistols--as in the revolutionary days of the '70s when the band was challenging the social and musical order.

The news coverage on the tragedy of the collapsed balcony has been extensive but superficial (Times, Nov. 16). No one has mentioned that the City of Malibu has been trying to institute stricter building codes and geological and environmental requirements so that disasters such as this one--and the Big Rock kind of overdevelopment--wouldn't happen. As a result, the city is inundated with lawsuits filed by irate developers and people who don't realize that overbuilding and ignoring the fragile geology of the coastal areas will result in more such disasters--and dwindling property values--not the other way around, as developers would like us to believe.

Jamie Lynn Spears is engaged, and big sis Britney Spears is thrilled. "So excited and happy for my sister, congrats @jamielynnspears - love you," Britney tweeted out Monday morning. Her tweet was in reaction to a couple of Instagram posts from the younger Spears on Sunday, when she shared the fact that boyfriend Jamie Watson had popped the question. "Guesssss what??????" Jamie Lynn wrote to caption an all-smiles shot of herself flaunting a new ring on that finger, with 30-year-old Watson at her side. Posting a brilliantly clear picture of a brilliant and big rock, the 21-year-old wrote on the second shot, "#hedidgood.

What is an asteroid? An asteroid is a big rock, often called a minor planet, that circles the sun. Asteroids are leftover material from the formation of the solar system and range from 580 miles across to the size of large boulders. How are asteroids different from comets? Or meteors? Comets are large blobs of ice and dust that streak across the sky. Meteoroids--as meteors are known while in deep space--are small objects, usually fragments of asteroids.

February 9, 1994 | ERIC MALNIC and KATHLEEN KELLEHER, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

For hundreds of Southern Californians, Tuesday was a day to face yet another Herculean cleanup chore--this time after massive mudslides the night before that invaded homes, buried streets and swept away cars in Malibu and stranded residents in Altadena. Shovels, hoses, skip-loaders and dump trucks were the tools of the day as armies of firefighters, Caltrans workers, public works employees and sheriff's deputies joined scores of homeowners in the effort to make order out of chaos.

March 11, 2012 | By Deborah Vankin and Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times

After an arduous, 105-mile journey from a dusty, remote Riverside quarry to the cultural heart of the Mid-Wilshire district, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's now-famous 340-ton granite boulder arrived safely at its new home before dawn Saturday. It took 11 cold and grueling nights on the road navigating tight corners, "crabbing" across bridges and narrowly avoiding collisions with towering utility poles, but LACMA's monolith arrived at exactly 4:25 a.m., illuminated by string lights and resting in a steel sling on its custom transporter.

An Arleta man was arrested Friday for throwing softball- to watermelon-sized rocks from an overpass above the Golden State Freeway, hitting at least five cars and slightly injuring a teen-age boy, the California Highway Patrol reported. The suspect was held for CHP officers by an enraged motorist whose truck was struck by a rock as it passed beneath Branford Street in Arleta.

The 10-ton meteor that streaked into Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 mph and exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk was a reminder that the universe is not such a hospitable place. Still, though hundreds of people were injured and thousands of windows were shattered, no one died and repairs can be made. By comparison, the terrestrial havoc wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States was far more devastating. In the movies, when humanity is faced with imminent doom, whether from a massive asteroid or an invasion of space monsters, the people of the world forget their differences, band together and save themselves.